


The Law of Vacant Places

by arbitrarily



Category: Fargo (TV), Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Fargo Fusion, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25658452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: They meet again in the back of a prison transport bus. Late 2009, mid-snowfall, en route from St. Cloud, Minnesota, sharing in legal and lethal peril alike, mostly on account of each other. Worse stories have begun with more auspicious meetings. Soon the bus will crash, proving that the law is only the start of a man’s troubles once trouble has decided to come for him.Trouble has come for the both of them.
Relationships: Brad Colbert/Ray Person
Comments: 12
Kudos: 36





	The Law of Vacant Places

**Author's Note:**

> I have ... no explanation or excuse for this. I keep meaning to write meritless filth, but then an actual plot Kool-Aid Mans into my house and here we are.
> 
> You don't need any prior knowledge of the _Fargo_ TV series for this beyond crime, moral conflict, and Minnesota, all of which I borrowed for the purposes of this fic. Other things _Fargo_ that I borrowed: the Handcuffed Together (& Forced to Tromp Through the Woods & Try to Survive) plot from the third season; an episode title for my own title; and, the character Gloria Burgle.

_ Baby, look at me. We’re a team, you and me. Simpatico to the point of spooky.  
_ FARGO

They meet again in the back of a prison transport bus. Late 2009, mid-snowfall, en route from St. Cloud, Minnesota, sharing in legal and lethal peril alike, mostly on account of each other. Worse stories have begun with more auspicious meetings. Soon the bus will crash, proving that the law is only the start of a man’s troubles once trouble has decided to come for him.

Trouble has come for the both of them.

When the bus crashes, they are not only in custody together but handcuffed together. Joined by the same chain hooked through the metal loop installed in the seat back before them. For whose precaution—their own, their fellow prisoners’, the bus driver’s—is unclear, but like most things, it is probably just protocol. Brad knows protocol well. It is the leash that still hangs around his throat, and when he runs too quickly, either in deviation of his own SOP or in ill-considered haste for what he wants but should not have, he is choked.

He makes a noise like that when the bus flips and his shoulder wrenches. Startled, choked, as Ray’s body is flung into his own. And as the bus lands on its side, as Ray lands on Brad’s side, he finds himself thinking, even if only for a moment, that maybe he missed this. Not the violence, not the promise of it, nor the broken glass or his muscles aching in protest, but all the bony parts of Ray, everything sharp and surprisingly strong about him, digging into his own body.

It’s then that Brad decides he must have suffered some sort of grievous head wound. That, and the fact he can taste the blood dripping down the side of his face. But then again, like most things that are his, it could just as easily be Ray’s.

**°**

To start at the beginning, you have to go to war. They did. They got back from Iraq, and something went wrong. Something you couldn’t fix. There were a couple years of normal and maybe even good, but all that did was give the wrongness a deeper place to take root.

It was Brad who suggested it. Framed it as a logical and sensible course of action: they would rob a bank. Ray thought he was kidding. Brad knew that because Ray said as much. He laughed, said, “Yeah, homes, sure, we’ll rob a fucking bank.” But Brad was serious, so Ray only laughed harder, and then, in his own way, he got serious, too.

Maybe it was Iraq. Maybe it was PTSD, sick in the head and he didn’t even know it. Maybe he came back and once he could articulate an idea beyond _fuck it_ , this was the one he landed on. Because here was the thing: something honorable and good in Brad got lost somewhere in the middle of OIF. He left it out in the desert and came home without. The flagpole for a spine, that was gone now, along with any sense he owed this country something or anything.

He had attached a reverence to the Corps he knew that Ray never felt. “It was a job,” Ray said one night. Brad, he claimed, was pouting, or as close to a pout as that thin-lipped, ass-kissing mouth was capable of (again, per Ray), about what was and wasn’t anymore.

And it was that same night that Ray leaned forward, his knee butting into the muscle of Brad’s thigh. It was California, they were in a bar, and the beer in his hand and flat on his tongue had too many hops.

“Hey,” he said, smart enough to keep his usual barnyard yawp soft and stupidly intimate. “Hey, Brad. Just for my own fucking edification, and for all the potential cash that might be lining my pockets some time in the near future, I gotta ask. How serious were you? About robbing a bank?”

It was Brad who went wrong, but it was Ray who didn’t so much as chase after him but gleefully kept pace.

The most important thing you need when robbing a bank is a plan. People always think it’s something else: the best safe-cracking equipment, the best team, the best guns. All of that can help, sure, but it’s fucking nothing without a plan.

They spent the better part of that summer preparing. Planning. First, they moved to Missouri. Second, they didn’t tell a soul. Brad didn’t want a team. He only wanted Ray.

Brad had never seen _Bonnie and Clyde_. He never saw _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_. His concept of outlaws was rooted in something purely his own. Brad was a man with a code. He had to have one, he didn’t know how to operate without ROE established first.

So he had rules. Such as, they did not kill civilians. They didn’t fuck with civilians.

Ray was eating, which meant that Brad was near to losing his own appetite. Ray shoved ketchup-smothered hash browns (mostly) into his mouth. “What about cops?” he said messily.

“I said civilians. I didn’t say anything about police, Ray.” And that right there, that was maybe when, if he had the foresight, he might’ve known where the trouble would come from. They hadn’t even started, and there they were, already talking about killing.

 _Hazard of the trade_ , Ray might’ve said if, a) Brad had the right kind of foresight; and, b) he voiced what he saw.

Instead, “It was a job,” Ray had said.

“Now,” Ray said, “so’s this.”

**°**

The bus crashes. Forty minutes northbound from St. Cloud, and the bus flips. The emergency lights flicker in the wrecked interior, strobe-like, enough to exacerbate what Brad suspects is probably definitely a concussion. Ray’s surprisingly heavy weight presses into his equally unexpectedly tender side. He’s on the point of telling Ray to shove off, with all the kindness he can muster (which in this specific scenario, and in perhaps any current or future scenario pertaining to Ray Person, is none), when there is a loud metallic shriek. From Brad’s limited vantage point he can see a spray of sparks. Whoever it is, they’re cutting through metal. They’re cutting through the locked cage door that leads back to the prisoner hold. _Good_ , Brad thinks, but at the same time Ray groans low in his throat and starts scrambling against Brad to sit up, get up, a panicked frenzy of muscle and limbs, like he knows what's coming, and before Brad can say anything about that either, a gun fires.

Okay, so, _not good_.

Ray yanks on the chain with all his might, which isn’t enough to break the metal hook screwed into the bus seat vinyl but it is enough to make Brad’s shoulder wince in protest. His arm jerks, wrist already raw there the handcuff has bitten into the skin.

“Brad? Brad? Hey, Brad, it’d be fucking superb if you could rejoin the land of the living right now because there’s no fucking way I’ll be able to lug your sorry ass and,” Ray trails off. Quiet descends, only it’s not quiet at all—there are men yelling, their fellow future inmates, some making the guttural noises that accompany the gut-shot and dying, and then, the most chilling and dispiriting sound of all: a shake to the cage door. Brad feels what has now become an all-too-familiar wrench on his right arm.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Ray keeps saying as he keeps pulling on the chain.

Brad takes a deep breath in, the cold Minnesota night filling his lungs, and he gets his head on straight. He sits up. Or, he tries to sit up.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

There is a small gap where the metal ring joins. Brad leverages it open enough, Ray pulling on Brad’s arm rather than the chain, stinking of stale cigarette smoke and the cold, body still all but plastered to his, and the chain finally slithers out. Ray’s already moving, trying to shoulder the back emergency exit open, but the latch is stuck. Ice, frozen. Ray throws his weight into it, making Brad sway towards him. The lights are still flickering, impossible to see who’s at the front of the bus, who it is advancing on them, beyond shadow and silhouette—but then the cage door opens.

“Ray,” Brad starts, oddly polite but still all warning.

“I.” Thump. “Know.” Thump.

The latch comes loose just as the first assailant advances and before any contact can be made—against Brad, from Brad, doesn’t fucking matter—Ray’s out the hatch and the momentum propels Brad back too, away from the swinging fist and what looks like the lead pipe in it. He teeters backwards, barely catching his balance as he hits pavement, out the same door Ray jumped. Ray’s still moving fast, reliable fast, ready at his six. He slams the emergency door, latching it shut and locked.

Inside the bus, a gun goes off again. Without prior agreement beyond the forced and the physical, they stagger back in unison, stepping off towards the road’s shoulder and the tree line that waits immediately beyond it. Ray glances down at the chain between them with obvious amusement.

“I should’ve known you’d be the one to Houdini our way out of here. Though it would’ve been fucking ninja if you could’ve done something about the cuffs, dude.”

“Ray. Shut the fuck up and run.”

Ray abides.

**°**

After their first robbery, Brad felt the same as he did after a firefight—all giddy adrenaline, the violent and wild certainty that they had gotten away with their lives despite all efforts to the contrary.

Ray drove. Brad watched their mirrors. Neither of them said anything, silence interrupted solely by the occasional snap of bitten-off laughter (Brad) or full-on fits of giggles that lasted long enough to prove almost infectious (Ray).

They pulled into the back lot of the Wagon Wheel Motel along Route 66. Brad had already secured them a room under a false name. The car was purchased with a similar bid for anonymity: cash, from an uninterested owner of an impound lot. Nothing could be traced to their real identities. They had thought of everything but what to do with the money.

They each carried in two heavy duffle bags (black, unmarked and unremarkable) and then Brad shut and locked the door.

Ray didn’t move. He hummed with unspent energy, but he stood there like he was waiting for Brad. Like they were back in the AO and Ray, albeit with bitching and moaning aplenty, would do as Brad told him. He was waiting for an order, so Brad gave him one.

“Open the bag.” His voice was rough, like maybe he was asking for more from Ray than that. Ray’s face was limned in shadow. Mid-afternoon, and they hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. Winter gloom, but enough gray made its way in even with the blinds drawn.

Ray unzipped the bag slowly, with a reticence that was foreign to the both of them. Maybe he expected to find a dead body or parts of one in there instead of cold hard cash. But, no, Ray’s mouth split into a wide grin as he yanked the zip the rest of the way open.

“Ah, yeah, motherfucker. That’s the shit right there.”

And there they were—crisp green bills bound in stacks. Brad didn’t know it at the time, but this was as good as they were gonna get. You never knew it at the time. All this would go to shit by the same time next year. Brad exhaled in the start of a laugh. “Yeah. That’s the shit.”

So they robbed banks. First Missouri, then Iowa, then north into Minnesota. They kept moving—“like fucking sharks, man,” (guess who), "keep going or we’ll sink.” So they never killed anyone. Ray called them repo men, a more acceptable term for what they did. Fucking Robin Hooding it, he said. Take from the rich—

“We are not giving a fucking dime away, Ray. I don’t know what sort of charity a pathetic limp-wrist communist like yourself thinks we’re running here, but all this? Is ours.”

“Yo, Colbert, chill. I know, I know. The only pockets we’re redistributing this income into are our own. And for that? I’m fucking stoked.”

All talk of money aside, Ray let Brad handle it. He had rules by the dozen for that, too. You got caught when you spent it, that was a rule. You got caught when you evaded taxes, that was another.

They sat at a shitty dive bar, the bar top sticky with spilled beer. Ray’s throat bobbed as he swallowed greedily, his third pint now empty.

“I’ve been thinking,” Brad started.

“Uh-oh,” Ray said. He slammed his empty glass down.

Brad ignored him. They were on the television mounted behind the bar. No recognizable features, just two men in black, a white van later left at a diner with a fairly decent cherry pie. Better coffee. BANK ROBBERY IN BEMIDJI, the chyron read. “I’ve been thinking,” he said again. "What’re your thoughts on laying down roots? Settling down?”

Ray shook his head, amused. “Aw, Bradley, now if that’s not gay as all fucking hell,” which, Brad knew, was Ray for _yes_.

**°**

Ray follows Brad as they head deeper into the woods.

Brad’s breathing heavily already. The crash did something uncomfortably wrong to his ribcage. Brad would never admit it, not out loud nor under pain of whatever certain death their pursuers have in store for them, but he’s gone softer since he left the Corps. There are certain parts of a person you could never change, but you lose a vital sharpness when the only defense and killing you do is as hobby or trade. When there’s no one to report to. When you’re living beyond it.

“Hey,” Ray hisses. So far, he’s spent their hour-plus sojourn into a dark Minnesota forest uncharacteristically quiet. Brad had given Ray the silent treatment back on the bus, and in response, Ray had pulled on the chain between them like a marionette string and he wanted to see Brad dance. Brad continued throughout their impromptu trek, more in a bid for stealth than anything else, and Ray, perhaps remembering his own recon training, followed suit. “Hey, so, homes, what’s the plan?”

Brad lifts an eyebrow. The cut along his forehead winces. “It's still on me to make us one of those?”

“Well, yeah, I—” Somewhere back the way they came, a branch cracks underfoot. They both freeze immediately. They eye each other, and just like that, it’s old times. They’re oscar mike. It’s the front seat of the humvee and the crackle and hiss of the radio, their own communication wordless.

They move quickly and silently, down a muddied and steep embankment. They crouch down behind a felled tree, wet snow soaking into the knees of his jeans. And they wait. They wait for a long fucking time.

Whoever’s after them is sloppy, one boon in their favor. He’ll take it.

They finally set out near 0400. They walk and they walk and, yeah, maybe Brad is trying to think of a plan.

He considers the facts. St. Cloud, warrants for their arrest. The information that brought him here in the first place: the Kansas City mob, whatever Ray owes them. The facts. Brad hates Minnesota. He hates the cold. He hates snow. He tells all of this to Ray as dawn begins to light and reach through the trees. Ray glances at him first with an expression that says, _good for fucking you_ , and then he says it out loud, too.

“What’d you think they crashed the bus for?” Brad asks abruptly.

“Oh, that’s definitely probably on account of me.”

“Kansas City?” Brad hedges.

Ray shrugs, inadvertently jerking Brad’s arm as the chain pulls. So, it’s official. They have not only the cops but the Kansas City mob on their tail. Brad can do the math. When you’re on the run from both the law and the mob, odds are, one is bound to catch you.

“You made enemies that quick?”

“It was six months, dude. That’s half a fucking year. And, besides. I’m told I’m an acquired taste. Like, y’know, anchovies or gorgonzola cheese. Jizz. Stuff with mouthfeel, stuff like that.”

“Ray, shut the fuck up.”

“What? Am I interfering with your wilderness survival skills? All that SERE training lighting up that frontal lobe? Honestly, though, I shouldn’t even front. This shit’s just about got me nostalgic as fuck. I wonder how Rudy’s doing.”

“Ray.”

Ray’s trailing after Brad now, his legs too short and the snow too deep to keep pace with him comfortably. Brad doesn’t slow down. Ray groans loudly.

“Enough of the bullshit. Let's talk like men. What the fuck are you even doing here?” Brad can’t see his face, but he can hear his whiny, breathless exasperation, can easily conjure the facial expression to match. From what Brad’s been able to see of him over the course of their night, Ray looks mostly the same as when he saw him last, except for how he doesn’t. He’s got a black eye, a healing scab on the bridge of his nose, or at least he did pre-crash. He’s strung-out and tired-looking, but that’s nothing new there.

“It was brought to my attention by a concerned third party that you might’ve gone and got yourself into some trouble you were most likely unable to extricate yourself from.” Brad regrets saying it immediately.

Ray stops moving. Brad glances over his shoulder to find him bracing himself, body squared off like he’s ready for a fight. Brad considers trying to drag him, but then he stops, too. Turns back to face him.

“Holy shit,” Ray laughs, uglier than usual. “The Iceman put his cape on and came all the way out here to rescue little ol’ me. I’m touched,” he says, as if he is very much so the opposite.

“Hell of a lot of good it did me.”

“Yeah, right? The road to hell and all that,” Ray says, suddenly cheerful now. He’s started walking again and it’s Brad behind him now, not entirely certain what exactly just transpired between them. He wants to call it forgiveness, but that implies he did something wrong in the first place. He didn’t; he’ll continue to hold fast to that.

After all, all he did was leave.

**°**

They settled down in Minnesota. They had made the local nightly news for the better part of a month. Unsolved string of tri-state bank robberies, and only now was some cop putting together they might all be connected. And one of Brad’s rules—

“I know, I know,” Ray held up a hand. “When it gets too hot, we go to ground. So, go to ground we’re going. Wouldn’t want the Iceman to melt.”

They put their heist career on hold, which gave Brad plenty of time to focus on their next issue: the cash. “You say Al Capone, man, I don’t even want to fucking hear it.” Ray, again. Brad didn’t say it, but he did set up what started as a dummy company only for it to become an accidental legitimate business. Or, it had the appearance of a legitimate business. They had to launder the money somehow. A security company, that was the idea. Moto Security; that was Ray’s idea of a name because if you asked him, this whole thing was some moto bullshit. Brad pointed out, correctly, it sounded as if they specialized in motorcycle security, which they definitely did not.

“Are you retarded, Brad? Are you high off your own stash here? Is that it? Because we don’t specialize in anything, man. It’s just a front. It’s all pretend!” It was, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do things right.

Still, they became Moto Security. They kept the description of their company vague and touted their former Marine careers with the same general ambiguity.

“I thought the whole point of this criminal venture of ours was so we wouldn’t have to actually, y’know, work.” That was what Ray said, seated in their newly rented office space. He spun around in one of the desk chairs that Brad had purchased with his military pay rather than out of their ill-gotten gains. The rest of the office, save for the chairs, was still empty. You had to have office space, you couldn’t just have a P.O. Box. If the IRS, or worse, came sniffing around, you wanted the appearance of an actual business. Brad had explained all of this, with diminishing patience, over breakfast a week prior. Ray sat naked at the kitchen table, his eyes big and half-awake as he barely listened. A healthy bruise had bloomed overnight at the base of his throat, complete with teeth marks. Maybe he was thinking about that instead of what Brad was saying. They were in Brad’s apartment, per the signed lease. Spartan, impersonal and utilitarian, the rent cheap, downtown Sauk Rapids. Their apartment, in every way that counted.

The storefront they rented was in Sauk Rapids, too.

Later that weekend they argued mercilessly in a Staples over office supplies and Brad was happy in such an open and effortless way that looking back he should have known better than to trust that it could last. They did not buy the copier that Ray claimed would give them, “baller plausibility in the event of a visit from Uncle Sam and associates,” or the fax machine that offended Brad’s modern sensibilities, but they did buy a red stapler and a filing cabinet they never used. Ray used the stapler.

“Field of Dreams, homes,” Ray said, but that was later. He said it as Brad turned off the lights and he locked the front door. Their first assignment, now completed. “If you build it, they will come.”

It was that easy. Too easy, to make the career shift to hired gun. All it took was renting some office space.

**°**

Their second night out they’re ambushed.

They spent the entire day walking. Footsore and tired, two among a million other complaints, they stumble upon a clearing well after sunset. A copse of trees encircles what Brad first assumed was a former campsite. A stump sits in the center of the small clearing, a hatchet embedded in the wood. Ray makes a triumphant noise at the sight of it and immediately lunges for it.

“Free at last, free at last,” he says, prying the hatchet loose. He drops down to his knees and Brad follows suit. They have barely set the chain on the flat surface of the stump before the first shot echoes into the clearing. The bark splinters up into their faces as the first round of buckshot hits.

“What the fuck?” Ray shouts, uselessly.

Brad knows they’re both beyond exhausted, but that’s no excuse for their absolutely shit situational awareness. The asshole who comes tearing out of the tree line shouldn’t be a fucking surprise and Ray definitely should not have a knife embedded in the meat of his calf. But, well.

Brad reacts instinctively. He throws himself at the guy, assuming he’s unarmed (knife, meet Ray), forgetting he’s still tied, literally, to Ray. There’s a sickening crunch as Brad throws a sloppy left-handed punch, his knuckles finding bone. Another round of buckshot echoes. Another man emerges into the clearing, shotgun in hand, reloading. Ray makes a warbling animal sound when he tries to put weight on his leg, the hatchet raised like a child’s toy. He barrels clumsily at him, fucking his attempt at a third shot, even as the chain tethered between them fucks them both.

Brad’s ears ring from a particularly sharp pop to the side of his head. Another has him feeling like his brain is rattling around in his skull. He’s never actually had the opportunity to engage in a knock-out, drag-down fight with one hand tied behind his back before; he can say now with absolute certainty, it fucking sucks. An utter and complete waste of his potential. His right hand, and by extension his right arm, are still linked to Ray. He can’t fight both the men who’ve ambushed them and his own instinct to use that hand and arm. He keeps jerking a flailing Ray toward him, into the punches he throws, making Ray follow him. Ray’s feet slip and slide through the fast melting snow. He snarls and cusses as he tries to defend his own circle of reach, something truly revolting happening with that hatchet, if only based on the noises the man with the shotgun is making until he isn’t.

Brad takes another hit, one to the throat that makes him wheeze though he remains upright, and another to the kidneys that does bring him down. He lumbers back upright, moving solely out of furious adrenaline. He can remember that stretch of time, after they quit the bank jobs and started the killing, when Ray would go out looking for first drink and then a fight. How many bars had he had to drag his bleary-eyed carcass out of? He knew what Ray’s blood smelled like, he’d cleaned it off his hands more times than his own. Brad couldn’t understand it then, the urge to invite further violence after everything they did. He tried to think of it as it had been back in the Corps, boys scrapping and fighting just for something to do with themselves, their fists and the capacity to kill.

Even if this is as far from practice as a man can get, Brad thinks he gets it now. Each impact feels earned in some cosmically huge scheme of things. He’s done his fair share of unconscionable shit. He doesn’t cite each crime against his name, but it feels as if each hit is doing that for him. He doesn’t think he’s ever understood Ray better.

As if just thinking his name is enough to bring him to him, Ray crashes into Brad at the same time he hears the crack of the shotgun yet again. The pain is slow to arrive, but when it does, sharp but shallow down Brad’s side, he hisses, staggers sideways, and threatens to drop to his knees. Ray’s still moving though, and this time, it’s Brad whose shoulder tweaks, his arm that extends, as Ray reaches forward.

He loops the chain that joins them around the throat of the man Brad has come to think of as his sparring partner. And then he starts to pull. Their own makeshift garrote; Brad joins him. Ray puts in a considerable amount of work as an alarming amount of red streaks in the gray snow around Brad. Each pull on the chain makes his entire body quiver with pain. His jaw aches, both from being hit and from keeping his teeth clenched so tight.

It takes too long. Up close, like this, it always takes too long for a man to die.

After, Ray reaches for the hatchet half-buried in the kicked up snow and dirt, dragging Brad with him. He still has a knife sticking out of his leg. Brad idly thinks he should maybe say, if not do, something about that, but instead he does nothing. He listens to the clink of metal on metal as Ray, finally, manages to break the chain. It’s only then that they both collapse down into the bloody snow.

**°**

Brad didn’t touch Ray until after the third robbery. A night job that time, Ray nearly as good with rewiring security systems as he was with a radio. He wasn't bad with a safe either.

They gave up on motels. They rented a storage unit instead, the money stowed there until they could figure out what the fuck to do with it.

It was in there, dark and closed away, he touched him. He jacked Ray off, Ray’s face stuck between a mask of riotous disbelief and unfiltered pleasure, like this right here, Brad touching him, Brad wanting him, was even crazier than anything else they had ever done together. But crazy was not the same thing as surprise; that was what the look on Ray’s face said. It said, _Now?_ It said, _Finally._ It said, _I’ve been waiting, you motherfucker_.

The first time they fucked when there wasn’t a robbery involved they were drunk, which was a coward’s way of trying to absolve himself of any responsibility. Brad’s not a coward, and he wasn’t that night either. He knew exactly what the fuck he was doing and that was dragging his open mouth down the length of Ray’s cock. He can remember everything in over-bright, visceral flashes. Ray babbling his name, the ache that began in his jaw he found he wanted to deepen, found that he wanted to be left sore and used, the salty, human taste of flesh and dick mixing with the acid from the tequila. Disgusting, yet simultaneously not unpleasant. Couldn’t be, the way his pulse had evacuated down to his own cock. He had started to both sweat and drool as he made a low, humming noise, broken only by the involuntary click and swallow of his throat and every single thing Ray had to plead and say.

Brad doesn’t want to think about why his mind always makes the leap from spit and come and sweat to blood. But it does. They fucked after they killed too, so maybe that’s why. Took life and then gave it, mouths open and breathing into each other, learning each other even after they both thought they already knew everything worth knowing. _Finally_ , they’d breathe to each other, only without the word. Even as they learned—what earns this sound and what makes a muscle jump, what makes him beg and how much can he take—they still didn’t need any words.

There are many things Brad does not want to think about. For example, he can’t decide which is worse: the first civilian they killed, that they were paid for it, or the fact that after, in the cab of the truck they had purloined from a used car lot and would later leave hollowed-out and burning on the side of the road near an abandoned pig farm, Ray had braked. He stopped in the middle of the road, the middle of nowhere. Empty landscape on either side, empty sky above, and Ray kissed him. When the snow began to fall, Brad could’ve been forgiven for finding it romantic. It was the only thing there to forgive.

**°**

“You still got a knife in your leg.” It’s the first thing either of them has said in what Brad guesses has been the last ten minutes but could just as easily have been an hour.

“Huh.” It’s all Ray offers him.

Brad shivers. The night is fucking freezing. He manages to pull himself up to a sitting position. Ray turns his head slowly, like it requires realigning vertebrae and his tolerance for pain. “I’d make a crass yet hilarious joke about pulling out, but you’ll understand if my capacity for well-crafted humor is at, like, basement level right now.

A brief and breathless laugh slips from Brad that, like everything else, hurts. A cloud of condensation smears the crisp air in front of him. “Fuck. That was brutal.” The words come out wheezing.

Ray looks at him with wide _yeah-no-shit_ eyes. His lip is split and bleeding down his chin. His teeth chatter. His entire face is awash in blood—the scab at the bridge of his nose reopened, blood leaking down from his hairline and along his cheek. Brad thinks about smudging the blood away but he doesn’t want to move. He also doesn’t want to touch his face.

Brad still has that surreal feeling, as if everything is moving slow-and-fast, slow-and-fast, and he quickly cycles through a list of possible causes. There are all the obvious culprits: hypothermia, exposure, dehydration, blood loss, exhaustion. All of the above. The night out here is quiet, quiet in a way that reminds him of the desert, but then, if he tries hard enough, everything reminds him of the desert. Everything reminds him of Ray, and goddamn, if that isn’t unfair.

“Fuck,” he says again, resisting the urge to lay out flat on his back again and possibly never get up. He feels more than a little dizzy. He finally gives in and lays back down, his eyes closing. He’s dimly aware of the sound of Ray moving beside him. “Ugh,” Brad thinks he says. His mouth is sticky, swollen and sore. “This is a bad place to die, but I accept it.”

He opens his eyes and Ray is crouched over him. Bleeding on him. “You fucking drama queen, get the fuck up.”

Brad takes a deep breath in, already sure that’s exactly what he’ll do. In a minute. Give him a minute. The moon glows off the snow around them, lighting up Ray’s face. He looks awful, in more ways than one.

“Where the fuck did you go?” Brad hears himself ask. The question’s a non-sequitur, but maybe not. It’s hung around in the air since the bus, dragged along like the chain between them.

“I never left, asshole. That was you.” He grins then, and Brad really wishes he wouldn’t. His teeth are dark with his own blood. “So, you gonna pull this knife out of me, or what?”

**°**

The killing came easy, and maybe that was what got Brad the most. Maybe that was why he found he couldn’t keep doing this. He couldn’t keep Ray.

The night was late, and they were in the office. The windows were dark, the door locked. They were in the back room with the safe and a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, gifted to them by a happy client, now in possession of a decent chunk of the trucking trade along the I-94 corridor.

“Do you enjoy it, what we do?”

A brief frown dipped down Ray’s face that was just as quickly gone. “I said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a job. It’s a living, brother.”

“I keep thinking,” and then Brad stopped himself. He didn’t want to tell him what he kept thinking. It felt too close to a confession to admit out loud that over and over again he found himself returning to Baghdad. He kept hearing Poke, which he knew, Poke would just fucking love. But it was there, stuck in his head along with the multitude of other grievous shit he carried around with him. _It’s not a sin to kill if you don’t enjoy killing_ , that was what Poke said. _My question is, whether indifference is the same as enjoyment_. Was ease the same thing as indifference? That was what Brad wanted to know. Needed to know. He’d brushed Poke off at the time, the question tainted through its association with religion, but he felt its wrongness now. Maybe he even felt what Poke had felt then, too.

“I want out,” Brad said instead. He was met with a brief look of abject betrayal on Ray’s face that, for mere seconds, he did nothing to disguise. “It’s gone too far. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do what we do—”

“What? Killing?”

“—and we’ve been living in the wrong for too fucking long.” Brad delivered the line—because that was what it was, what it felt like, even in his mouth—halting and regimented. Ray rolled his eyes.

“You don’t fucking believe that.” Ray was watching him closely, but then Ray was always watching him closely. Brad didn’t miss that. From the moment they met, Ray had been clocking each and every thing about him. He knew that, perhaps, because he did the same. Ray leaned forward, his mostly empty glass clutched in his hands. “It’s not any different, you know. Assignments are assignments, orders are fucking orders.”

“We choose to follow them now.”

Ray scoffed. He leaned back. “Come on, we chose then, too. No one put a gun to our head to be out there. It’s always a choice, dude.”

“I don’t think I like this choice anymore.”

“You sound like a pussy.” Ray said it like a joke, but there was a real threat there. He was ready to fight if Brad was.

“I’m not fucking around, Ray.”

“Wait, you’re actually being serious? This is some legit dark night of the soul bullshit? Tell me you’re fucking with me, Bradley, and I’ll forget it forever.” When Brad didn’t say anything, Ray’s jaw tightened. "Need I remind you this entire enterprise was entirely your idea?”

Brad shook his head slowly. “Not the killing.”

“You never said no.”

“You wanted it.”

“I wouldn’t have if you said no! I could’ve wanted what you wanted.” There was something too earnest about it, both his voice and saying it out loud. They had been in each other’s pocket for too long. You didn’t tell another person you would do what they wanted. You didn’t give away that kind of power. Coldness settled in behind his eyes and he knew Ray could see that.

“I’m saying no now.”

“And I’m saying that maybe it’s too fucking late. Train’s left the goddamn station. We got opportunity not only at the fucking door, but the call is coming from inside the house. Shit, man, we’re in the big leagues now. Kansas fucking City. You don’t just walk away from that.”

“I am. I can.” Brad paused. “It’s always a choice, right? Well, I’m making mine. I’m out. I’m leaving. I don’t want this anymore.”

For the first time in all the years that Brad had known him, Brad could describe Ray’s face as unreadable. He looked for hurt and couldn’t find it, which was how he knew Ray was taking this deeply personal. Guilt curdled; he ignored it.

“Fuck you,” Ray finally said, and that was that.

Someone once told him that he chose a lonely life. That someone was his ex-fiancee and he told her that it wasn’t a choice if she was the one who was leaving him. She looked at him like that was a very sad thing to say, sadder even than the act of leaving him and then accusing him of loneliness. Of telling him that everything that ever happened to him was his own doing.

He didn’t think much of it after. When he was alone. He was good at that, taking the little things that needled him and the big things that could destroy him and stowing them away. He moved to Chicago, and for a good while there, he thought about it all the time.

After Minnesota, Brad went straight for a time. He left Ray behind. He got a job in Chicago, security. Actual security, not the sham he and Ray had started out in Minnesota. Nine to five desk work, and he hated every minute of it. He had a narrow office, broken venetian blinds, a noisy heating duct above his head that rattled in the worst of winter. He got beers with his coworkers but rarely said anything. He was Brad Colbert, but a Brad Colbert untethered from his past. None of them knew anything about him, as if he was an alien dropped from the sky, unbound from the connections they each had forged through the process of living a life well into adulthood.

But that was the thing about the past. It always caught up with you.

“What the fuck is a white boy like you doing in Chicago, Iceman?”

“Poke. Good to hear from you too.”

“I’m a busy man. I don't got the time for all that chit-chatting small talk.” A brief pause followed and with it came the click of a turn signal. “Person go with you, too?”

“No, he did not.”

Poke’s exhale crackled over the line. “Then I guess the rumors are fucking true.”

“What rumors?”

“Ray’s been running with a rough crew these days, dawg. Lilley was telling me, he got it off Walt, that your boy went full KC, and then, like a regular dumbass, he turned on them.”

“What, and the Sunshine Band?”

“Don’t go all smooth-brained on me, motherfucker. You know I’m talking Kansas City.”

“Ray’s not that stupid.”

“Stupid? Nah. Reckless? Hell yeah.”

“What’re you telling me for?”

“Nuh-uh. No way am I explaining your shit to you, Brad. Not even close to my job,” he said. And then, quieter, kinder, even: “He’s out of his depth, bro.”

Brad wanted to argue. He wanted to say that Ray always knew where he was going. When all else had failed, he had been both Brad’s map and his compass. He got Brad there, he got him where he needed to go. He could take himself anywhere. He’d be fine.

All the same, he glanced out his upper floor apartment window at the gathering snow clouds. He still reached for his coat. He still left.

Brad was pulled over on his bike north of Minneapolis. He was shivering. He hated Minnesota.

“Nasty night for a ride, wouldn’t you say so?” Highway Patrol said, perfectly friendly.

It would give Brad minimal comfort to know: no potential response was going to keep him out of handcuffs once they ran his plates and once they saw his name.

He waited in the interrogation room. The cop across from him opened a file, accompanying the action with a long-suffering sigh. Brad had expected it to be his; it wasn’t. JOSHUA RAY PERSON. His mugshot looked like they’d caught him mid-sneeze.

Brad Colbert was brought into custody of the St. Cloud police for the simple reason he was on file as a known accomplice of Joshua Ray Person. The injustice of that was near enough to knock him out of the chair.

The cop, who looked in desperate need of another cup of coffee and probably a donut, asked if he knew this man. “Sure,” Brad said, easy as anything despite the tightness settling in around his mouth.

“Care to elaborate?”

“We served together. U.S. Marine Corps, two tours. Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“And we thank you for your service.” It was the lady cop this time, simultaneously sober and warm. She took the job serious, he could see that much. Could even respect it. She had introduced herself as Gloria Burgle. The male cop had not given a name. “How’s about after?”

“Stateside, a couple years after we left the Corps, we went into business together. For a bit.”

“And what line of business was that?”

“Security. Consultation, mostly.”

“There any money in that?”

“Some.”

The other cop leaned forward. “Now, see. I hear security consultation and I see two men with backgrounds such as your own, and I take a look at your IRS returns—yeah, don’t look at me like that, I did my homework—and I know one thing for certain: sounds like a lot of fancy talk for killers-for-hire.”

“And, see, I hear that, and I think, if you knew that for certain, we would be having a very different conversation right now, wouldn’t we? Sir?”

Burgle holds up a hand. “Now, alright. Okay. That’s enough of all that. We’re talking, is all. Trying to create a picture.” _Sure_ , Brad thought, his face shifting infinitesimally, _before the frame-up_. She turned her attention back to Brad. “Can you tell me what happened? Why you boys aren't in business together any longer?”

“I found he made for a temperamental partner. We didn’t work well together.” It surprised Brad—of all the lies and half-truths he had uttered and would utter in this room, this one was the hardest.

“Then you went to Chicago and you found yourself a different firm to work for, is that so?”

“That is so, ma’am.” 

“So. What’d you come back here for?”

And there it was: the one-million dollar question, if you were setting the price based on his probable bail. He refused to let his gaze drift back to the mugshot on the table. He wouldn’t give himself away. He had done enough of that already.

**°**

They finally make it to a motel. Seedy as fuck, the both of them gray-skinned with exhaustion, hunger, and potential internal bleeding.

“I don’t imagine you’re in the habit of doing two broken, lost travelers such as ourselves a favor, are you?” Ray asks the motel clerk. They have very little to their names. They cannot use their names. All they have is a green Volkswagen Beetle that Ray hot-wired in a bowling alley parking lot, the neon lights in the shape of pins and a ball and the word BOWL! rising up out of the snow impossible and mirage-like. But the car was real enough, and in the glove compartment they found a Glock, pristine and never fired; seventy-seven dollars and a handful of change (which Brad intends not to spend unless they absolutely have to); an expired bottle of Percocet prescribed to someone by the name of Paul Marrane; and a postcard that read _Fargo_ across the front, red font over a forest snow scene. On the back, in careful black ink, was written: “There be dragons here.” Tucked under the backseat was a first aid kit and a _Playboy_ from 1979.

“Have we got a guardian angel or what?” Ray had said as they pulled out of the lot.

Now, to the motel clerk, he says, “We’re veterans. If that makes you feel good about doing good things for bad people.”

Funny enough, it does.

The motel room looks as if it’s seen better decades. Brad wedges the lone chair under the doorknob. He draws the curtains. Ray limps over and yanks the bedside table drawer open. He holds up a dusty bible. “Just making sure we got all our cliches tallied.”

Brad ignores him. “So,” Brad says. God, but he’s tired. He picks up the first aid kit brought in from the car. “Show you mine if you show me yours?”

“Fucking pervert, I always knew it.” Ray’s face then goes almost sheepish. “Honestly, homes, I’m almost afraid to take anything off. I have this feeling, if I do? Gonna be full-on elevator doors parting in the _The Shining_ and I’m just gonna bleed the fuck out in here, though,” and with his good leg he kicks at a disturbing stain on the worn carpet, “not sure anyone around here would notice.”

“Ray, take off your fucking clothes.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

The bathroom is just as dispiriting as the rest of the room.

They both hover over the sink, trying to wash two days of grime and two murders off their hands. They need to get some bolt cutters, get these bracelets off, but at least they managed to break the chain. They’re no longer attached, but still. They’re operating as if they are. Maybe they’ve always operated as if they are.

After getting nearly kicked in the head trying to clean out the knife wound in Ray’s calf, Brad gingerly removes his own shirt. It’s decidedly unpleasant.

“Dude, what the fuck. You got shot?” Brad had been trying to play it somewhat cool that he’s got buckshot loaded into his body, but Ray’s reacting way more dramatic than the man without the buckshot in him has any right to. “You get shot, you fucking say something about it.”

“I got shot,” Brad says drolly.

Ray mutters under his breath as he works—something about Brad and something about where he can go—delicately picking out shot, ignoring each noise of complaint Brad accidentally makes.

When he's done, they get in the shower together, the both of them impatient and tired and crabby and frankly fucking sick of each other yet somehow unable to get enough. Wet skin bumps against wet skin under the minimal water pressure. It’s oddly impersonal, unlike every other time he’s been with Ray like this. By this, he means naked. He leans away when Ray hisses. Brad glances down at his body. Ray’s entire left side is one ugly purpling bruise, mottled as the blood rises under the surface. Ray laughs though, strangled and nearly wild, as he presses a hand into it, as if testing himself. His dick twitches at his thigh.

“Fuck but you’re predictable,” Brad grumbles under his breath, barely audible over the running water, and maybe that’s why he does it. He loosely wraps an arm around Ray’s waist and he draws him back against him. Brad’s chest is flush with Ray’s back, aching and uncomfortable, and it’s as if everything remotely friendly and easy between them evaporates. Detonates, nuclear fallout. He wants to hold Ray to him, he wants to take the time and the space to finally acknowledge that however fucked the circumstances are, they’re a team again. They’re together again.

Ray presses his hands flat to the grimy shower wall and he’s not laughing now and Brad never was laughing. Brad leans into him that much more, abandoning pretext, dizzy and lightheaded, his arm tightening around Ray’s middle. The water goes cold as it falls over them, the both of them shivering. Blood and dirt swirl down the drain at their feet.

**°**

The last time they had been in a motel together Ray had Brad on his knees and threatened to make him beg for it.

“This part of the plan, too?” Ray had said after, his voice warm and amused, his mouth still pressed to the sweat-slick curve of Brad’s shoulder. All of him was slick—his mouth, swollen and used, his chest against the thin sheets, down between his legs from the lube Ray had been far too generous with. The cleft of his ass, lower; he could still feel the tacky spill of Ray’s come.

Ray’s voice was dangerous, but that’s memory poisoning the well. That’s memory declaring affection hostile. That’s Brad begging his past self to shoot on sight, to stop before he gave himself away that much more.

**°**

“Hey, Brad?”

Brad considers pretending to be asleep, but he knows better. He knows Ray. That won’t stop him. “What?”

“Do you think we did it wrong?” Brad doesn’t say anything. He lets the night seep in between them. “Do you think—you think we took the wrong road?”

“What?”

“Like, you said it. There was a choice. We had a choice. Way back when, when you had your great brilliant fucking John Dillinger idea, and we were like, awesome, and we did it, and then we got going and every idea we’ve had since then—we didn’t stop, not until you wanted to, and by then, fuck, man, it was already too late. We already chose the wrong fucking road.” Brad doesn’t like what he’s saying. He likes even less how he’s saying it. There’s still that manic edge that runs through anything Ray does, but there’s a genuine sadness too, a loss, and Brad’s never known what to do with that. He can handle his own loss, he can deal with every ounce of guilt he’s earned, but Ray? He can picture him now, not in the bed beside his, but in Iraq. Baghdad. Silent and sullen, then furious and near tears, pushing through the crowd of them as Rudy called after him. Brad’s never known how to make things right.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I think I get it now. I think—you only get the one choice, the one that really matters, and everything after that, fuck. It doesn’t matter. You’re already fucked.” He wants to tell Ray that isn’t a question, that he’s already made up his mind, but he’s tired and he hurts and in a few hours, despite anything Ray’s said in the last five minutes, they’re going to have to make some more choices.

“You already dug your grave,” Ray’s saying, an edge of laughter there, that same post-firefight mania creeping in. Brad knows what that is, and it’s acceptance. Thrown to the dogs, shitty command, all you got was the man beside you.

“Ray, are you trying to blame me for all the dumbfuck decisions you’ve made in your sorry excuse for a life?”

The thin curtains do nothing to keep the parking lot lights out of the room. He hears Ray scoff and then the rasp of the dry, over-washed sheets over his body as he moves.

“Fuck you, Brad,” he says, but he’s quiet now. Quiet enough that Brad can hear him breathing, even, steady, if not sharp and over-fast. “I’m saying I chose you.”

Brad doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with that. It’s like being handed a live explosive. A beating heart.

“I’m saying,” Ray says, slower, “I’m choosing you now.”

“Because you’re fucked?”

“Well, yeah. But I want to be fucked with you.”

Brad can feel his mouth tipping up into a faint smile without his permission. “I’ve fucking missed you.” His mouth says that without his permission, too.

Ray snorts. “Jesus Christ, Bradley. That’s gay as fucking Liberace or, like, a fucking used and abused asshole.”

“Lovely.”

“Hey, Brad?”

“What?” Sleep is starting to claim him, his voice is barely audible.

“What’re we gonna do now?”

Brad forces his eyes open again. He lays on his back even though it hurts like hell. He stares up at the ceiling. They’re gonna do what they should’ve done from the start.

“We’re gonna run,” he says.

**°**

They led him to the back of the prison transport bus. Ray was waiting for him. He looked up at him with a black eye and a smug, gleeful grin. He watched as Brad was cuffed to the same chain that was latched to him.

“Dude,” Ray said. “I had a dream exactly like this once.”

**°**

Brad doesn’t know when he started wanting Ray. He wants to say it was in that room at the Wagon Wheel, after their first job. Robbery, not murder. Dreary Missouri winter afternoon stripping everything of color but Ray, right there at Brad’s side. He had him almost where he wanted him. He knew want then, but if he’s honest, he knew it before too. He still can’t think of the desert, he can’t think of Iraq, of that humvee, of digging a grave, without also remembering that quiet hunger that lived in his gut. Even now, he refuses to name it.

He has always built his life around something other than himself. He can see that, too. For most of that life, it was the Corps. The choice had been easy. It was dignified, fucking heroic if he wanted it to be. Now, he knows what he has actually done. He has gone and done the very thing he always railed against. He went and built his life around another person.

Brad has three things currently in his favor: the location of a safe house sixty klicks from here (and now that neither of them is openly bleeding out he is confident they can reach it sans detection, ambush, or repeat arrest); the contents of said safe house (arty, namely of the AK-variety, cash, fake IDs, better first aid supplies, canned beans); and, Ray. He has Ray. Ray can hot-wire a car. Ray can talk them out of more trouble than he can talk them into. Ray can drive.

And come morning, he does. They hit the road early, pre-dawn. Ray butchers the lyrics to “Gloria,” Laura Branigan not Patti Smith, though Ray has more to say about Patti Smith than Laura Branigan, and he drives. The sun is just now starting to come up, a bloody pink and red that spreads past Ray’s head as they travel south.

Ray yawns, wide and spit-wet. “Shit, man, I know I said those percocets were a fucking bonanza sent by the Lord above or, like, Satan down below, but I am groggy as a motherfucker. What I really need are some uppers. The good shit, long-haul trucker shit, and I will go all day and all fucking night.” He slaps the steering wheel for emphasis, yet still yawns again. “First gas station we see, dude. I’m stopping. I’m gonna get me some.”

“No, Ray. You’re not. For one, we have no expendable cash, and under no uncertain terms will we stoop so low as to rob a gas station. Second. Need I remind you we are currently wanted fugitives—”

“Yeah, and whose fault is that?”

“—and the very last thing your hideous in-bred disassembly of facial features needs to be paraded in front of is first CCTV and then whichever yokel Minnesota cops are granted the favor of chasing after us.”

“Point taken. But,” and Ray pauses, which is never anything good. “Not even one of those Taco Bell-Baskin Robbins E.coli nightmare factories?”

“Especially not one of those. Knowing you, you’d be tempted to grab some chow on our way out the door and we’d find ourselves wasting valuable escape time with you, shitting your brains out on the side of the road.”

“There’s a picture,” Ray says. He yawns again, and then he beams. “Okay, so, what if I promise, on my life and what little remains of it, that the only thing I’ll grab is some Red Bull or whatever?” He glances towards Brad. “Come on, Brad. Don’t you trust me?”

A dim smile breaks over Brad’s face same as the sun finally breaks through on the horizon, parting hazy cloud cover. He turns to Ray.

Brad looks at him, he meets his eye. He’s never understood the expression, “as good as new.” That’s not anything he wants, not when it comes to Ray. He wants as good as the old days, good as they’ve ever been together at their best. There’s a small indent between Ray’s eyebrows, a subtle twist to his mouth. Brad knows that face. He knows him. Ray knows him, too. He doesn’t have to say anything. Brad thinks, _good._ He thinks, _finally,_ same as a different, better person might think, _home_. And then the moment is gone, or the moment is always there, suspended between them, crystalline and fine. _Finally_. “Keep your eyes on the road,” Brad says, and there’s the flash of Ray’s teeth, the shake of his head, amusement that’s probably just another name for affection, violent and personal and real. Brad lets himself settle back into the passenger seat. He think he might rest his eyes for a little. Ray has driven them through worse.


End file.
